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Saturday, August 06, 2011

The AL MVP award is shaping up as a Boston-New York battle, with Adrian Gonzalez, Jacoby Ellsbury, and, if his August and September rival his July, Dustin Pedroia all legit candidates, and Granderson very much in the hunt.

People who favor pitchers are also throwing in the name of CC Sabathia, who will take the mound this afternoon with a 13-2 record in his last 15 decisions, not to mention having surrendered just seven earned runs ...

Back in 2008 Shane Victorino made it clear to Dodgers pitcher Hiroki Kuroda that you do not throw at his head. Tonight, he made it clear to Giants pitcher Ramon Ramirez that it is not ok to throw at his back simply because you’re the defending the World Series Champions, down 8-2, and in the midst of getting embarrassed at home.

Shane was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He tossed his bat aside, started towards the mound, and was temporarily restrained by home plate umpire ...

Friday, August 05, 2011

6) Andrew “The Scranton Horror” Brackman, RHP, Grade B-: 7.26 ERA with 58/69 K/BB in 76 innings for Scranton, 71 hits allowed. He is hounded by abominable, eldritch control problems, like insane flute music pulsating with a mind-bending disharmony of universal, ultimate chaos. Those who ruminate overmuch on the chthonic mysteries of Andrew Brackman’s career put their sanity at risk, as their mental boundaries melt under the hideous assault of such an unspeakable waste of talent and money. ...

Tony Campana drove in a pair of runs with an inside-the-park homer and the Chicago Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds 4-3 on Friday for their sixth consecutive victory.

It was the first professional homer for Campana, who also singled, doubled and made a nice catch in center field. Campana became the first Cub ever to hit an inside-the-park shot at Wrigley Field for his first major league homer.
...
Campana, among the fastest players in baseball, zipped around the bases and scored standing up ...

Baseball sent a warning to its major and minor league players last week that may sound odd, if not comical, but is a sign of these drug-testing times: stop ingesting deer antler spray.

Until the warning went out, baseball players, taking their cues from the body-building and NFL cultures, felt safe using a deer antler spray as an alternative to steroids with almost no risk of flunking a drug test.

You will be shocked at what this GM… (Beware of Porn Spam Bots on Facebook!)

In addressing the bloggers during last night’s Royal’s game with Baltimore, Moore said, “We’re not gonna out-talent anybody here. We’ve got one of the smallest markets in all of sports, period. Our owner is a terrific owner, but he’s not going to go out and spend a $100 million payroll when we can only sustain a $55 million or $60 million payroll in this market.”

Asked what changes the team might undertake this upcoming offseason, Ricketts was noncommittal.

“I don’t know just yet,” he said. “It’s something we’ll decide at the right time.”

“A lot of players on our team are from the Dominican Republic,” said Ricketts. “We thought perhaps if we had a little better facility down there we could give our guys more resources to attract and develop the right players.”

Ricketts’ youngest brother, Todd, was featured on the CBS program “Undercover Boss.” He ...

What a spectacle of undignified behavior, of hypocrisy, of extremism, of civility abandoned, of epic brattiness. Could a despoiled city possibly have proved itself more worthy of its tarnished reputation?

I’m talking, of course, about last Sunday’s Tigers-Angels game at Comerica Park in Detroit.

Either get Krabbenhoft on the phone or have Bill James sit Papi down and explain RBI to him.

Despite a fantastic statistical season, the cranky side of David Ortiz surfaced again on Thursday night.

In a year that has seen the Boston Red Sox slugger battle pitchers from the Orioles and blame the media for being hit by the Yankees, Ortiz didn’t try to hide his emotions after Fenway Park’s official scorer removed a RBI that was Ortiz was initially given after an opposite-field single during ...

One night near the end of the 2008 season, we played the first-place Phillies, in Philadelphia. Well, my teammates played. I watched from home. We lost the game, the fourth straight time they’d beat us. I flicked off the TV. If only I could have pitched tonight, I thought. I carefully flexed my elbow. It wasn’t coming around like I thought it would. My surgeon had warned me there’d be days like this, that every rehab had its peaks and valleys. But this particular valley had lasted too ...

Are you a traditionalist? Adrian Gonzalez is hitting .356, leads the league in RBIs, and plays for a first place team. He’s the classic model of what a league MVP has traditionally been. If you like RBIs and team win totals, you don’t have to look far to find your obvious candidate.

Did you grow up reading Bill James? Then you’re probably in the “best player should win” camp, and you prefer to reward a guy for what he did and ...

Another look into the mindset of ballplayers from the other side of the Pacific (or at least one of those countries from the other side of the Pacific):

Kuroda said he heard that Larry Bowa, the Dodgers’ former third base coach, said on MLB Network that any player who refused to be traded from a noncontender to a contender should have his mental makeup questioned. (Bowa said in a telephone interview Thursday that his comments were directed at U.S.-born players, adding that he is aware Kuroda ...

If baseball players are the pillars of one model of orderly society, art is littered with the corpses of social outcasts. Nietzsche and Van Gogh went crazy. Dostoyevsky was politically oppressed. Brian Wilson couldn’t get out of bed for a decade. But there’s a reason why A&E can get away with running low-budget shows like “Hoarders” and “Intervention” back-to-back for 24 hours at a time. Even in the baseball universe, we can’t escape the pull ...

In short, he was exactly the ace the Mets wanted and more. Since then however, Johan has spent parts of 3 seasons on the DL including likely missing the entire 2011 campaign. The Mets aren’t getting anything out of their expensive starter other than a lot of headaches, he’s not putting fans in the seats at Citi Field while he sits on the DL, and they’ve won nothing since he’s been there and are currently a below average major league team (no matter ...

What he did:If baseball awarded the equivalent of Oscars, Pinson would have been a perennial Best Supporting Actor nominee. One of the quintessential role players of the 1960s, Pinson did many things well, hitting for average and power, stealing 305 bases lifetime, and finishing just shy of 3,000 hits. He was never really a star, overshadowed by Cincinnati Reds teammates like Frank Robinson and Pete Rose, though Pinson ...

So with a decorative wreath from a Hannibal flower shop, I stopped and wished the local baseball hero a happy birthday.

I wonder what an early ballplayer like Beckley would think of the game today? What would he have to say about these enormous ballparks that can hold more people than there are in his hometown of Hannibal? The color barrier was broken long after he died. I’m curious what he would have to say about such a diverse ...

Calumet farm burials be damned! A swift look at sabermetric use in the racing game.

But things have changed in racing, just as they have changed in other sports. The sabermetrics movement, defined by objective analysis, especially statistics, shunned the insider perspective in baseball and has altered the way the sport is run. In professional basketball, “stat geeks” use mathematical formulas in an attempt to assess a player’s contribution in more meaningful ways than a scoring average ...

Ambrose McConnell, of the White Sox, has a queer hobby. He picks up pins of every description, never passing one by without stopping to gather it in. Amby has a theory that every pin picked up means a base hit for him…His specialty is hairpins.

The head of a sports memorabilia company in Minnesota is charged with orchestrating a scheme to sell fraudulent merchandise, including jerseys said to be worn during games by baseball players like Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire and Albert Pujols.

Forty-year-old Steven Jensen of Osseo was arrested Thursday at a sports collectors’ convention outside Chicago. He is charged in federal court in New York with mail fraud and ...

Boras then had those numbers printed out on crisp white paper and tucked inside blue binders. Each of them was stamped with silver foil: BARRY ZITO, FREE AGENT PRESENTATION. That binder eventually won Boras and Zito a seven-year, $126 million contract from the San Francisco Giants, then the largest ever for a pitcher. But on that afternoon it was a just a binder, science’s rigid attempt to define the abstract. Boras gave one of them to Zito, who took it back to his house in Hollywood. He put ...

There’s absolutely no reason, other than to sell tickets and to put butts in the seats, to bring Stephen Strasburg back to make a few starts at the end of the season. He’s too valuable. He’s too talented to even think about stuff like that. But in their case, you know, having worked with those people, the only thing I can say is that there are some people there that think they invented the game of baseball. Which they did not.